Top 58 Nick Hanauer Quotes

#1. The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #78746
#2. I make an eight-figure income annually.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #160820
#3. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #210483
#4. I have a 15-year-old boy, and we are about to give him car keys, which seems like an act of insanity when you know what you know about 15-year-old boy behavior. But in 2018, we'll have self-driving cars, and it will be so much better. My son may be the last generation of kids who learns to drive.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #212980
#5. The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that's quite charming, but in a real economy, it's much more problematic.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #279291
#6. A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #319497
#7. In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #343070
#8. We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #357811
#9. You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people saying the same thing in the same way. "If we have to pay you more, it will be bad for you." And that's because saying that is a much more polite way of saying, "I'm rich, you're poor, and I would prefer to keep it what way."

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #498002
#10. You see, we capitalists will never actually ask you to work overtime. I don't even track your hours. I just make it clear that I trust you to get your job done in the time allotted. And then I hand you twice as much work as you can reasonably do in a 40-hour week.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #572527
#11. I was at the forefront of the effort to pass $15 minimum wage in Seattle, and have been collaborating with the people who are trying to make that happen across the country.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #608163
#12. Diversity is America's most valuable resource. It is what makes us the most innovative nation on Earth.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #612056
#13. One of the things that I think makes me successful is the way in which I collaborate with others. In my opinion, nothing great is ever the product of one mind. It's always a consequence of some sort of self-critical collaboration.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #612518
#14. The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #616542
#15. It is true that rich people can spend more money than middle class people, but there's this upper limit on what we can spend. I drive a very nice car, but it's only one car. I don't own a thousand, even though I earn a thousand times the median wage. I have a few jackets, not a few thousand.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #620687
#16. When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #632238
#17. Now one person doing the job of one and a half. So as an employer I can get two people to do the work of three, and think about what that does for profits.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #659059
#18. People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #719330
#19. Greed is a sin because humans are social creatures. And they simply cannot survive without the opposite of greed, which is cooperation.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #728637
#20. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #777830
#21. The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #827752
#22. We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It's simply not true.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #828590
#23. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #851409
#24. Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #867143
#25. The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to 'encourage' you to 'do what it takes' to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #907712
#26. Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #927712
#27. Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #941390
#28. I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #976140
#29. Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people - both as innovators and customers - diminishing both innovation and demand.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1056324
#30. Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1066750
#31. My message is that the counterclaim - which is that if wages go up, employment will go down - is a scam. It's a con job. It's an intimidation tactic. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that it's true. On the contrary, where you find high wages you usually find low unemployment.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1070180
#32. The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1151794
#33. A lot of people think that persuasion is all about values and aligning values. I largely disagree. I think persuasion generally, and political persuasion more particularly, has much more to do with explaining in new ways and connecting dots in new ways than just invoking emotions and values.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1165470
#34. If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1200903
#35. I have absolutely no rituals or routines other than I work obsessively and think constantly about my work, to the dismay and discomfort of everyone I employ. And my family.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1224133
#36. The most pro-business thing you can do is to help middle-class people thrive.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1287914
#37. I'm not the world's best philosopher. But I am one of the world's best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1308585
#38. There is no earthly reason why Walmart and McDonald's and Walgreens and these other giant, profitable institutions should have one worker in need of public assistance. It's ridiculous.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1313643
#39. Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1376881
#40. The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers. The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1392908
#41. Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1422364
#42. If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth to the wealthy leat to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1446647
#43. I was more conservative when I was younger. But I don't think that I've moved left - I think the country has moved right.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1458558
#44. Prosperity isn't something that squirts out of rich people.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1486301
#45. Raising the minimum wage a lot across the board would make a big difference. It's not the only thing, but it's an indispensable part of solving the problem.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1517352
#46. Government does create prosperity and growth by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive; balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism - it's essential to it.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1528460
#47. During Seattle's successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, 'If $15 is so good, why not $50?' It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1533262
#48. In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1569717
#49. No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1597064
#50. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1605809
#51. I have, oddly, two ski houses - trying to sell one.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1612597
#52. All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another?

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1617169
#53. The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.'

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1647197
#54. I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left-wing? How did that become 'leftie?' That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1655269
#55. Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1690884
#56. If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1691923
#57. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1725756
#58. Raising the overtime threshold - something that is about to happen. This is more complex so not as many people understand it, but it's equally consequential.

Nick Hanauer

Nick Hanauer Quotes #1863534

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